reckonerSeated calf raise
Sit with the pads across your thighs and press up onto your toes. Bending the knee shortens the big two headed calf muscle and takes it largely out of the movement, which leaves the soleus underneath it doing the work. That is the whole reason this machine exists.
Drop to a deep stretch, then press tall.
- Pattern
- Calf
- Trains
- Calves
- Kit
- Machine calf
- Loading
- A weight you choose
- Reckoner prescribes
- 3 sets of 10 to 15 reps at RPE 8
- Progression step
- 5 kg once the top of the range is clean
- Skill
- Simple to learn
- Recovery cost
- Very low
Muscles worked
How to do it
Set the pad snug across your thighs
Just above the knees, tight enough that it does not lift when you press. Balls of your feet on the platform with the heels hanging off the back.
Release the safety and let the heels drop
Take the weight, unlatch, and let your heels come down below the platform until you feel the stretch. Do not rush this first drop, because the weight is already on.
Drop to a deep stretch, then press tall
That is the cue on your wrist. Full drop at the bottom, then press up until the ankles are fully extended and you are as high on your toes as the machine allows.
Control both directions
Take longer to come down than to go up, and pause at the bottom. Bouncing off the stretch is easy on this machine and it hands the rep to your tendon.
What goes wrong
Bouncing off the bottom
With the load right on top of your knees, the stretched position springs you back up if you let it. Pause at the bottom for a beat on every rep. If you cannot, take weight off.
Believing it is the better calf exercise because it isolates
It isolates less than people think, and it grows less. Over twelve weeks, seated training grew the two gastrocnemius heads 1.7 and 0.6 per cent against 12.4 and 9.2 per cent standing, and the whole calf 2.1 against 5.61. The soleus, which is what the bent knee is meant to target, grew about the same either way at 2.9 against 2.1.
Making it the only calf exercise you do
If you do one calf raise, it should be a standing one. This is worth having in addition, and it is a poor choice as a replacement, which is the opposite of how it usually gets programmed.
How Reckoner progresses this lift
Six weeks of this lift, from 40 kg, run through the real engine. Nothing below was typed in: the prescription, the decision and the sentence beside it all come from the same code that writes your week.
| Week | Prescribed | What it did |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | 3 x 10 at 40 kg | More reps 10 → 11 repsYou finished every set at RPE 7, with room left in the range, so the reps climb before the load does. |
| 2 | 3 x 11 at 40 kg | More reps 11 → 12 repsYou finished every set at RPE 7, with room left in the range, so the reps climb before the load does. |
| 3 | 3 x 12 at 40 kg | More reps 12 → 13 repsYou finished every set at RPE 7, with room left in the range, so the reps climb before the load does. |
| 4 | 3 x 13 at 40 kg | More reps 13 → 14 repsYou finished every set at RPE 7, with room left in the range, so the reps climb before the load does. |
| 5 | 3 x 14 at 40 kg | Deload 40% of sets offFive weeks of building, then one week lighter. About 40% of the sets come off. The load holds and your reps stay where you earned them, so you keep the strength and lose the fatigue. |
| 6 | 2 x 14 at 40 kg | More reps 14 → 15 repsYou finished every set at RPE 7, with room left in the range, so the reps climb before the load does. The lighter week is over, so this is back to three sets. |
Real engine output, not an illustration. Every row was produced by running the engine itself when this page was generated.
The full rule, and why the reps move before the load does, is in how Reckoner decides to add weight.
Questions people ask
Does the seated calf raise target the soleus?
Yes, in the sense that the bent knee takes the gastrocnemius largely out of it. What the evidence does not support is that this makes it better for the soleus: over twelve weeks the soleus grew 2.9 per cent seated against 2.1 per cent standing, which is a small difference in favor of seated, while the gastrocnemius difference ran the other way by a factor of several1.
So is there any reason to do these?
Yes. It reaches the soleus at a knee angle that standing work does not, it lets you train calves with no load on your spine, and it is available when a standing machine is not. Run it alongside a standing raise rather than instead of one.
Will Reckoner take this out of my plan for an injury?
No. The library records no restrictions against any calf movement, this one included.
Similar movements
Reckoner eases the load first when this lift stalls, and offers one of these only if it stalls again after that. A lift already as light as your kit goes has no load left to ease, so the offer comes straight away. Each of them has a page.
Sources
- Kinoshita and colleagues, Frontiers in Physiology, 2023. Triceps surae muscle hypertrophy is greater after standing versus seated calf-raise training fourteen untrained adults training one leg standing and the other seated for twelve weeks, the standing leg growing the two gastrocnemius heads by 12.4 and 9.2 per cent against 1.7 and 0.6 per cent seated, the soleus growing about the same either way at 2.1 against 2.9 per cent, and the whole calf growing 5.6 against 2.1 per cent